


around the world and back again

by kay_okay



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Established Relationship, Kissing, M/M, Mexico, Mexico City, Rain, Storms, Tour, Touring, Travel, ii, interactive introverts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-20 01:37:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14885166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_okay/pseuds/kay_okay
Summary: Phil looks down into brown eyes, sparkling and giant and ones he’s memorized the shape of.





	around the world and back again

**Author's Note:**

> title and lyrics included lifted from ["titus was born" by young the giant](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sL1f9Q25sM). 
> 
> the biggest of big thank yous go to my beta the darling cait [@commonemergency](https://archiveofourown.org/users/commonemergency/pseuds/commonemergency/works) who did so much more than beta, she was my cheering section, my inspiration, and helped me just keep swimming <333
> 
> i hope they do choose mexico city to perform in if they make a stop for ii, it's a wonderful, beautiful city with so much culture and art, delicious food, and locals who welcome you like one of their own. it'll forever hold a special place in my heart, and i hope i can communicate a little bit of that love through this fic, too.
> 
> this is a work of fiction. this is a fictional story about fictional representations of real people. none of the events are true. no profit was made from this work. all mistakes left are my own.

_titus was born under the eye of a storm_  
_rainwater carried his bed around the world and back again_  
_oh, all the things he had seen,_  
_life is a dream, drifting at sea_  
_it's so hard to believe_  


 

 

“So… Guess it’s rainy season.”

Phil looks out of their hotel window, a suite up on the tenth floor overlooking Chapultepec Park. The trees form a neat parallelogram of nature between the buildings of downtown Mexico City, and Phil imagines it’s bustling down there between the glass and concrete, even in the pouring evening rain that neither he nor Dan had anticipated.

To his credit, Dan actually formulates an answer to Phil’s comment, albeit a muffled one from under mounds of pillow and duvet.

“Too tired. Come to bed.”

Their plane was delayed due to the weather here, an extra four hours in a cramped airport seat in Toronto, another hour circling the tarmac before they could even land. Phil was tired and annoyed, Dan was practically scratching the walls.

Phil complies, leaves the picture window to cross the carpeted floor and climb under the covers, shedding clothes along the way. When he’s tucked in, Dan painted along his side and cheek pressed into Phil’s chest, they’re down to skin on skin.

“Tomorrow we’ll be proper tourists,” he contends, hand already at home combing through Dan’s shower-damp curls. Dan grunts a half-asleep response, ticks his toes along Phil’s shin. Phil supposes that’s an agreement of sorts.  
  
  
  
The rain’s let up by morning. It’s still cloudy, the sky a muted slate colour thick with condensation that threatens to spill over at any minute, so Phil reminds Dan to toss in their small travel umbrellas into their backpack before they leave their hotel room.

They get sweet Mexican coffee on the corner from a street vendor, piping hot with cinnamon on top and served in a styrofoam cup. Dan leans too far into his first sip and gets foam on his upper lip, Phil lets him walk down the street with his moustache for four blocks before he finally motions for him to wipe it off. Dan threatens to throw the rest of his drink down Phil’s shirt.

The walk to the park doesn’t take long, and they cut through tiny, colourful streets of stacked 1920’s style brownstone flats made of brick and plaster. Flowers spill from balconies of every shade, bright green palm leaves hang from rooftop gardens to shade the windows below. They pass gorgeous murals along shop corners: a twelve-foot painted landscape of a sunset over the desert, a Virgin Mary with a shroud of constellations and stardust, a dalmatian puppy with rainbow gradient spots. Phil’s never seen anything like it.

Dan snaps photo after photo, exclaiming out loud to Phil when he sees something particularly vibrant or odd, like the life-size plastic skeleton propped up against a wall in an alley, leaning on its elbow and seated in a discarded office chair.

“Is this some kind of street art?” Dan asks, leaning back as he looks down at the screen of his phone, lines up his shot. “A subtle protest of the everyman’s nine-to-five? ‘All work and no play,’ all that?”

Phil glances beyond the skeleton and gestures to an overflowing bin, black plastic with  _ BASURA  _ in giant white letters. “I think this is just trash, Dan.”

It’s at that point Dan really does come for Phil, shouting more threats about drinks down shirts as he chases him down the alley.  
  
  
  
Lunch is steamed tamales wrapped in banana leaves, ordered to go and eaten alongside the park’s small lake. Grateful for a break in the clouds and the sliver of sunlight that slides through, Phil slips off his navy jumper and sits on it as a barrier above the grass. He budges over for Dan to share and they eat in companionable silence straight out of the wrappers, fogging up their sunglasses.

It’s not crowded today, an inconspicuous afternoon midweek, and when they’ve finished eating, Phil sits cross-legged, bumps his knee on Dan’s thigh. “You feeling rested?” he asks.

Dan hums affirmatively, crosses his legs at the ankles and leans back on his elbows. The picture of relaxation. He doesn’t look like he’s just spent nearly five months doing almost 100 shows, meeting thousands of people, and racking up more frequent flier miles than he can count.

“Well, that’s great,” Phil replies, and there’s an unintentional tone there he didn’t plan on layering his response with.

Dan glances over. He lets the moment charge a little before pivots, leans his upper body on one elbow to face Phil.

“And you?”

And. And Phil, what? Phil doesn’t know how to answer that question. It’s a mishmash of words in his brain trying to describe how he feels having this tour, these crazy five months and hundreds of shows and thousands of people all… ending.

He says the first words that come to mind, push themselves through the alphabet soup and make it past his lips.

“I don’t know.”

Dan watches him but Phil can’t meet his eyes. Eventually he looks away, Dan playing with a blade of grass down at his fingertips and plucking up small white flowers one by one.

“Do you remember coming home from the first one?” Dan asks, so casually it could be off-handed. “I was so exhausted I got pneumonia practically the moment we got back.”

Dan trembling in their bed for days, going back and forth between burning up and clammy cold. Phil doesn’t want to ever experience something like that again.

“It’s different now though, isn’t it?” Dan asks. He’s splitting apart the stems of the flowers with his thumbnail, weaving the white petals through and linking the fragile pieces carefully. “We’re in a different place, mentally and physically. We’re older, of course -- well you are, I mean, I’ve still got my youth -- ” and Phil lets out a scoff, “ -- We’re more prepared this time around.”

Phil folds his lower lip between his teeth, worries it there. He’s right, of course he is, but it’s the  _ after  _ that has him wondering. The  _ after _ the tour, the  _ after _ they get home. What happens then is a giant question mark.

But being with someone for nearly ten years has its advantages, one chiefly being that you often don’t need to actually say what you’re thinking for the other person to pick up on it.

Dan takes his sunglasses off and squints up at Phil, discards his haphazard daisy chain and presses the backs of his fingers against Phil’s knee, a small point of contact to ground them. “We’ll figure the rest out later, Phil,” he says so easily, “We always do.”

Phil feels it deep in his heart, feels the sentence winding down through his veins to the palms of his hands and the pads of his feet and the tips of his tousled hair. Dan’s good with words when he wants to be, so open now and he tries to speak his mind in a way that’s firm but respectful. Honest and loving. Phil looks down into brown eyes, sparkling and giant and ones he’s memorized the shape of.

Phil smiles, lightly runs his fingertip along the bridge of Dan’s nose. “You always know what to say.”

He shrugs in response, rolls to his back, gustily proclaiming, “It’s tough, but somehow, I do.”  
  
  
  
They go to the Xochimilco canals at the suggestion of their taxi driver, ride a brightly-coloured gondola called a  _ trajinera _ through narrow waterways and tall grass. Pedro is their gondolier and he tells them almost all the boats here are named, proper nouns like  _ Rosita  _ and  _ Stephani  _ and  _ Carmela  _ after relatives of the boats’ owners, letters decorated with flowers in an arc above the boat’s entrance.

They’re sharing the boat with a couple from Australia. Having just traveled through Central America for their honeymoon, they’re stopped in Mexico City for a few days to decompress before they head back to Sydney.

Vivian and Ollie are kind and down to earth, chit-chatting with Dan and Phil between Pedro’s stories and people-watching. They’re self-professed homebody types that wanted to do experience something new together after marriage but before kids.

Dan tells them they’ve been to Australia, Vivian wants to see England and Ireland. They talk about the breakfast place in Adelaide that Phil loved, because Ollie’s from there and it turns out he knows exactly the place they’re talking about. Phil recommends places to stay in Ireland when they go there, the best castle to see outside of Dublin with a beautiful view of the ocean.

It feels easy, Phil thinks. To socialise like this with strangers, to let conversation flow honestly. It hasn’t happened very often, especially not recently. The alphabet soup comes back to Phil, tangles around his heart in a confusing combination of emotions.

Dan’s hand on his knee brings him out of his thoughts. He’s handing him something, a cold beer bottle passed from a floating vendor that Phil passes to Vivian, then to Ollie and Pedro, down the line until they all five have one in their hands. They clink the necks of them, drink to traveling and new friends and to Mexico City.

After Dan’s tipped his bottle back, he grins. He looks at Phil with half-moon eyes, crinkled and laughing at something Vivian’s saying, leaning back to put his free arm around Phil’s chair and talking excitedly. He’s happy, Phil recognizes, happy and weightless. Phil always wants to see him like that.  
  
  
  
They stop to buy churros on their way home, freshly fried sweet dough sprinkled with sugar -- Phil spends the additional pesos to get chocolate sauce dripped all over them and doesn’t regret it one bit -- and they walk the few blocks back to their hotel slowly, indulging themselves after a long day of being tourists.

Rather randomly, Phil comments out loud how glad he is it hadn’t rained all day while they’ve been out. It only takes five seconds, and there’s a crack of thunder.

Dan stops in his tracks and stares at Phil. “I can’t believe you just fucking said that,” he deadpans.

“I’m sorry!” Phil shouts, pushing them under an eave as rain starts to trickle down in fat drops, taking his backpack off. “It’s okay, you put the umbrellas in here, right?”

Dan stares at him. “No, I thought you did.”

“Dan, I asked you to. I put them on the desk by the door and said, ‘Put these in the backpack, it looks like it’s going to rain.’” Phil’s still poking around in the backpack, like they’re going to magically turn up.

“You said, ‘I put these in the backpack, I think it’s going to rain.’”

Phil rolls his eyes, still pawing around. “Why would I say that when you were wearing the backpack when we left?”

“I wasn’t even in the room when you said it!”

The rain’s getting harder against the flimsy tin roof they’re gathered under, Phil’s still digging around, Dan’s looking at him like he’s crazy.  _ The umbrellas aren’t in there,  _ he’s saying,  _ why are you still doing that. _

“It’s just a few more blocks, let’s just -- ”

“Don’t say run, Daniel James Howell. Do not say run to me right now.”

Dan holds his hands up in a peace offering. “Lightly jog. Like how we jog all the time at the park. Easy.”

“We did that once.”

“Like that one time we jogged at the park,” Dan corrects, not missing a beat, “Easy.”

Phil sighs. Dan has a hoodie so he tugs it up, but Phil’s hoodless jumper is of no use. He holds the backpack over his head as they leave the security of the eave.

Dan’s right, it’s not a long trip back, but the rain is incessant and they’re soaked within minutes. Dan’s curls are plastered to his forehead, Phil running a hand through his own hair every few steps to get it out of his eyes. He’s given up on the backpack, just slings it back over his shoulder and tries to shield his gaze from the rain.

But for some reason, he finds himself laughing. He watches Dan trying to avoid puddles so his jeans don’t get too soaked, hopping over rushing water around corners like a kid playing hopscotch. They’re forced to stop at a busy intersection, waiting for the light to change.

“Hey Dan,” he says calmly. Dan turns and Phil jumps into a puddle on the corner, spraying Dan’s legs with fresh rainwater.

The noise Dan makes is primal, shock and betrayal and indignation rolled into one and Dan wastes no time doing it back, jumping into the same puddle and laughing in delight as it showers all over Phil’s jumper.

It’s downhill from there, Phil chasing Dan down the block until he finally catches him by the hood, shaking a tree branch in his face and sending raindrops all over him. Dan yells, laughing out loud and plucking a different branch back at him, and when he sputters and lets him go, Dan runs ahead.

They make it to their hotel, run past the front desk and through the lobby soaking wet and laughing uncontrollably, no doubt turning the heads of everyone they pass. Two six-foot British guys looking like drowned rats hightailing it at full speed through a hotel is not something that happens every day.

Somehow, it doesn’t take them long to get to their room. The elevator’s there waiting, Dan already has their key out, and before Phil knows what’s happening their door is open and he’s pushing Dan inside, pressing him against the back of the door when it’s shut.

His lips taste like sugar and chocolate, rainwater against his tongue and across his skin that Phil never wants to wash off. Phil fits a hand around the back of Dan’s head, tugs the hood until it slips off and Dan tilts his face back, bares his neck.

Phil submits, lays kisses across Dan’s open plains and relishes the moment his lips vibrate with Dan’s moan. Dan’s hands aren’t idle, they slide up Phil’s jumper to press into damp skin, warm hands kneading against bone and muscle and Phil raises his arms, breaks away to let Dan lift the wet clothes off.

When he’s shirtless, fresh waves of goosebumps riding down his skin, Dan turns them around and pushes Phil’s back to the door. He resumes their kisses, mouth working against Phil’s as his hands trail down, pop the button and lower the zipper on Phil’s jeans deftly in one swift motion.

The sharp sound sends a shockwave up Phil’s spine. He has only a moment to open his eyes as Dan’s mouth leaves his, watching him lower to his knees at Phil’s feet.

He’s grinning up at him again, tinged with something else this time though, not breaking eye contact as he tugs Phil’s jeans to the floor. Phil dazedly steps out of his shoes and socks, and Dan tugs the soaked jeans over Phil’s feet, running his hands up Phil’s bare thighs once he tosses the denim across the room.

“Well, look at you,” Phil comments after a beat.

“I’d rather look at you,” Dan replies, voice pitched low, fingertips crawling under the hem at Phil’s pants. Phil feels the back of his head hit the door, closing his eyes tightly to the feel of soft hands and a warm, sweet mouth.  
  
  
  
Their last show of the tour is incredible, because of course it is. Their fans here are so kind, get emotional when they meet them and take photos with hilarious poses. They say things like  _ we never thought you’d make it here,  _ fanart and letters pressed into their hands, or  _ I’m so happy you did this tour and shared this all with us. _

It doesn’t rain their whole last day in Mexico City. They meet Vivian and Ollie for dinner, pig out on delicious authentic food, drink too many margaritas. Phil feels warm and happy on their walk home, content to lean his shoulder into Dan’s with little regard as they stroll down a darkened residential road.

“Happy to be going home?” Dan asks him. It’s a tentative press, Phil knows, but the night is stacked with a tour’s worth of memories and it still hasn’t really hit Phil that that’s where they’re going next. It’s been a long time of itineraries and plans and it’s odd to not have that laid out in front of him anymore.

But, he is. “I am,” Phil answers carefully. “I’m happy to be going home.”

He’s not always good at this part, the words and the open honesty, that’s Dan’s forte now. But Phil knows how to love just as well.

So he stops them on the sidewalk, keeps Dan close as he lays his palms against his face. He looks into eyes he’s memorized the shape of, half-moon and sparkling and all his. When he kisses him, it’s brief, chaste even. _I’m happy to go anywhere with you,_ pressed against lips like a promise, and they smile together.

They’ll figure the rest out later.

 

**Author's Note:**

> this was written for the phandom fic fest based on D&P on tour! woohoo check them out here [@phandomficfests](http://phandomficfests.tumblr.com)
> 
> find me on [tumblr](http://kay-okays.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](http://twitter.com/kay_okays) <3


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